Category Archives: Early-grade reading assessment

By Ray Adams, Director of ACER’s Centre for Global Education Monitoring and a Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne

This blog was also published by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

The push for globally-comparable measures of learning is truly underway, with work well advanced through the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML) to develop common metrics to benchmark student performance in reading and mathematics. The development of common metrics is fundamental to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4): ensure inclusive and quality education for all by 2030. Common metrics are crucial if we are to obtain a comprehensive and comparable picture of how well children are learning what they need to learn – the ‘quality’ part of the SDG 4 equation. Continue reading →

This blog was also published by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

Last month saw a major leap forward on the global reporting of learning outcomes – on which children are learning, which children are not learning, and why.

At a meeting convened by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in Washington D.C. on June 26, partners representing regional and international learning assessments, as well as development partners, pledged to move forward together to tackle the pressing need for comparable data on learning outcomes at the global level. Continue reading →

In his short story “Instructions to climb a ladder,” Julio Cortazar uses more than 380 words to explain an action that, you would think, requires no explanation at all. He writes, for example: “The first steps are always the most difficult, just to acquire the coordination needed.” He also notes the coincidence of the raising of “the foot” and “the foot” of the ladder.

What a difference a year makes. Last week in Nairobi, when we woke to find a grey blanket of fog wrapped around our conference centre, it was hard to believe that only a year ago, the founding directors of our citizen-led assessment movement set up the People’s Action for Learning (PAL) Network. The Network is a south-south partnership whose member countries carry out sample-based, citizen-led assessments to measure the learning levels of all children in their own homes, regardless of their age, gender, or whether they go to school or not. Continue reading →